[thelist] (Intel + Linux) vs (Sun + Solaris)

[Matt Liotta]

First of all, I wouldn't put so many services on the same machine. It would
be much better to have your DB on a separate machine from your web server.

As far as reliability and performance, an Intel solution is going to out
perform a Sparc solution easily unless we are talking more than 8
processors. However, Sun hardware is generally more reliable than Intel
hardware. Solaris vs. Linux is really a none issue as both are just as
reliable and perform just as well for web serving. In other words, you
should go with Intel and Linux.

-Matt

On 4/12/02 4:50 PM, "Mo Martin" <mo_ee at bigfoot.com> wrote:

> We're running into capacity limits on our web hardware and my head
> technical guy is suggesting a switch from Solaris running on Sun
> hardware to Linux running on Intel processors. I trust him but want
> some additional opinions.
>
> It's a mid-sized corporate site serving about a million visitors a
> month. 4M pages a month about 50-75% of which are fed from the
> database. Steady, predictable growth but quite rapid -- more than
> doubling each year. The site serves pages and data sheets, no
> transactions or e-commerce.
>
> We run three Solaris machines (Sun CPUs) now but one does all the
> work. It runs Sybase 7 and Cold Fusion 4.5, and Apache. It's a
> three-year-old old machine with dual 330 MHz processors. The other
> machines are single-processor 300 MHz versions just serving HTML,
> mail, and PDFs. One also runs Lyris, a list server, at fairly low
> volume. All the machines are at a co-lo -- we own and run them, they
> house them and provide bandwidth.
>
> The choice is between buying a newer Sun server and RAID array; or
> going with a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 with RAID array for around $4500.
>
> He also is suggesting we consolidate our processes. We have Cold
> Fusion and Sybase on one machine; and two separate machines sharing
> the HTML serving and mail functions. He wants to put it all on one
> box (and use the old boxes as spares/backups).
>
> Primary desire is for reliability and performance.
>
> Thoughts?